Frightening Things
by Mithrigil
Summary: Fakir, and swords, and symbols, and the pitfalls of attraction to a duck.


**Frightening Things**

**Mithrigil Galtirglin**

* * *

In a town that had lost quite a bit—but not all, never _all_—of its magic, a sword fell off the wall of a small cottage. It was a rather large sword, which is most likely why it fell; one of the mounting nails had probably decided it just could not bear any more, and gave way. This in turn might have had something to do with the cottage's owner having a nightmare—one of the better ones he'd had in a while—that set his bed stuttering against that selfsame wall.

Lucky for the cottage's owner, the sound of the sword hitting the floor was enough to rouse him. This happened groggily and not as suddenly as he could have hoped, and some part of the nightmare remained with him even after he had fought past the crust at his eyes. He fumbled at the nightstand, and found his folio with the pen dangling from it by a stubborn black ribbon. Still in mostly darkness, much of which was the grainy milk-edge on his eyes, he pried the book open to any blank page, not caring if it was the next in line (it was never the next in line), and scribbled.

_Upon a time,_ he wrote slurred and ungraceful, _a man took too many symbols for truth. _

-

Later, he sat with his feet over the edge of his little boat—her name was _Kundry_—and drifted. He was surly enough that not even the low-flying gnats dared bother him, and the normally inquisitive fish took to gossiping an extra ten feet under and away. He also still had not bothered to put the mounting nails in his wall to rights, even though several hours had passed. It had been the undead of night when he'd woken, and now it was past midday, a full moon out-of-place in the clear sky.

The folio lay sprawled in his lap. It was warmer than the water on his toes, a good deal warmer. He'd filled in more of the story, some of which was nightmare, most of which was not—_He touched them, held them in his hands and turned them 'round before his eyes so he could know what they were. And because his hands and eyes were in accord, he had no cause to disbelieve, and so continued to treat the symbols—frightening things, with cut-ruby eyes like a wasp's and withered feathers—as if they were emblematic of some thing in his waking life._ He didn't remember whether the symbols had actually had feathers in the dream, but it seemed like an appropriate set of words and sounds to follow. The eyes, though, had been a proper detail.

He was halfway through the next sentence, _But when he tried to show the symbols to others,_ when she drifted his way and quacked, pertly, against the bare sole of his foot.

-

_the others would not laugh,_ he decided over a supper he had remembered to make but not to eat, _or condemn the man as mad, for in this world, there were many people who saw one thing and told of another._ His supper consisted of bread that had gone hard but not moldy, and the same soup that had carried him through this entire week. The story had not grown much since she had come to him on the lake. When she asked, he'd lowered his legs enough that she could grope and waddle her way up them and come to sit with him in _Kundry,_ nestling on his stomach and curling her long neck under her wing. He'd set down the folio and taken to stroking her feathers instead, and it grew dark around them, and she fell asleep there, pinning him in her absentminded, passive way.

Considering that the moon had risen in the afternoon, the man watched the sky darken around it instead of the thing itself. It happened fast, he thought, as he lay there stretched on his back, drifting, and soon the clear sky was the blue-black that poets described raven's wings as, even though most of them had only seen crows, or illustrations. The stars faded in, and little croaking warbles from her throat wound through his stomach. He was thinking about this now instead of eating.

He tripped over the fallen sword on the way back to bed. His toe bled.

-

_The man was discontent with symbols—he had long known of the boy who cried wolf, and Hans of the Stalk, and other stories of the kind—but this was because the others saw nothing at all. He would not have minded if they simply saw 'something else' when he held a symbol in his hands, because the human eye is a fickle, deceiving thing. But the others, to a man, saw nothing at all. This vexed him, and he feared it more than the symbols themselves, for what would become of him if the symbols consumed him and no one else could see their malice?_

_And so the man, when he could not take this alienation any more, consulted ancient lore. After searching for months, or years, or perhaps merely moments, he found the magic within himself. It would take only the breath from his lungs; he held a frightening symbol to it, and breathed upon it, and the hot air beaded on its cut-ruby eyes and withered feathers. So then, when he showed them to the others, they could not see the thing itself, but they knew that something was there, and the man could be assured that he was not dreaming entire._

_He grew fond of this process, of panting life into his symbols. And when he did, the withered feathers would swell and grow young, and the cut-ruby eyes would gather tears of his aspiration in all of their facets, and the symbols ceased to be so frightening anymore._

-

This time, when he dreamed, there was no sword to fall off the wall, no matter how many times the headboard thrashed into it, and he rode the nightmare to completion.

_But it was not his right,_ he scrawled on the wrong page of his folio,_ to use this magic, and give life to things only he could see._

--


End file.
